LANDSCAPE
L ANDSCAPE LECTURES July 2008 – June 2009
Revisiting Paradise: Landscape Journeys from South Asia to the Mediterranean • Mahvash Alemi, Great Garden Cities of Persia: Royal Safavid Gardens in 16th- and 17th-Century Iran • D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens and Fountains of Islamic Spain • Stephen F. Dale, Babur and his Gardens • James L. Wescoat, Jr., Conserving Water: Past and Present in a Rajput Palace Garden • Anna Pavord, Searching for Connections: An Adventure in Botanical History July 2009 – June 2010
The Landscape of Eternity • Marc Peter Keane, Heaven on Earth: The Paradise Gardens of Heian-period Japan
In the last three years, the Gardner Museum Landscape Department has established itself as an important center of scholarship and practice. Under the leadership of Patrick Chassé, the Museum’s first Curator of Landscape from January 2005–2009, nine distinctive Courtyard displays were designed; today, the stunning chrysanthemum display, which debuted in autumn 2008, and the traditional hanging nasturtiums are recognized as incomparable events in the Boston area. Another change in the Courtyard includes a new palette of permanent plants based on historic images commissioned by Isabella Gardner. Chassé also created the popular Landscape Visions lectures, inviting expert speakers to explore landscape from a variety of informed perspectives and to engage audiences with new scholarship and fresh ideas. Chassé resigned from his position in 2009, and after an extensive search, the Museum named Charles Waldheim/Urban Agency Consulting Curator of Landscape in December of 2010.
• Alan L. Ward, American Cemetery Landscapes: Through the Lens • Bettina Bergmann, “A Pleasant Place in Hades”: Roman Tomb Gardens • Mark Harris, Eternally Green: Natural Burial and New Cemetery Landscapes • Patrick Chassé, The Monumental Landscape: New Ways of Remembering July 2010 – June 2011
CIT Y.GARDEN.NOW • Laurie Olin, Gardens for American Institutions: Reflections from Recent Practice • Eelco Hooftman, Public Realm of the Senses • Alexander Reford, 100 Gardens: Conceptual Gardens and New Landscapes • Amale Andraos, Nature Revisited
Landscape Visions Lectures Since 2008, the Landscape Visions lectures have
brought noted speakers from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to offer audiences provocative new ways to understand landscape. Rooted in the Museum’s rich landscape tradition, but always innovative, the Gardner’s Landscape Visions lectures explored a common theme each season, tracing it through time and across geographies and cultures. In 2008–2009, the lecture series “Revisiting Paradise: Landscape Journeys from South Asia to the Mediterranean” examined the traditions and innovations of gardens and landscapes of the Islamic world. In 2009– 2010, “The Landscape of Eternity” explored landscapes and ideas that evoke our natural and symbolic responses to mortality, the afterlife, and memorialization,
14
0419.P.indd 14
3/20/12 12:19 PM